Humiston, owner of 34 tanning salons in upstate New York, should have realized this would mean his customers would worry less about tan lines.

Additionally, as the volunteer president of the Indoor Tanning Association, Humiston suspected a recession was coming.

When the economy booms, tanning beds fill our nation’s empty storefronts like hopeful rays of sunshine. And when the economy slows, they fade away like a Florida tan in a Washington, D.C., blizzard.

This is such a reliable and observable phenomenon, it could be used by the Federal Reserve Bank as an economic indicator.

Humiston has watched it for decades. He couldn’t get a job after college, so he bought two tanning beds and opened a salon in an office building basement in 1985.

Today, this business is called Tanning Bed Ltd., and operates locations in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton, N.Y.

“Our customers are the ones that are getting beat up by this economy,” Humiston told me. “When they have to make the decision to pay off groceries or pay for tanning they always end up buying the groceries.”

The Indoor Tanning Association estimates that the industry employs more than 160,000 people and annually generates $5 billion worth of economic activity. But those numbers are plummeting because of the economy, said the group’s executive director, John Overstreet.

In the last business cycle, America’s increasingly global corporations shipped high-paying jobs overseas. But lenders kept lending, so thousands of people took out mortgages on their homes to start small businesses. One of the small businesses they started was tanning salons.

What else were an unemployed mom and pop to do? Buy one of those juice-store or frozen-yogurt franchises? “90 percent of the people in this industry only own one store,” Humiston said.

Humiston should have demanded a bailout for all of them, but being a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008, he seems to have lacked the temerity.

So now, Congress has decided that tanning is one of the few industries healthy enough to tax.

Over the weekend, Congressional leaders came up with a 10 percent tax on tanning salon services that is expected to raise $2.7 billion over the next 10 years. This is what they came up with to help pay for health-care reform.

Have a good look at the skin in Congress. It’s not like they use tanning salon services. They’re kinda yellow.

People in Washington don’t even have the liposuctioned guts to enact the “botax” on cosmetic surgery. Yet they have no problem beating up on a highly fragmented industry, mostly patronized by women, in a dead-of-night vote.

“Out of all industries you could chose, why the tanning industry? Because we’re so wealthy? Because we’re making so much money? From customers who pay $6 for a tan? No, it’s because we’re not going to fight back.”

Congressional aides have said the tanning industry should be taxed because of cancer concerns. But the sun causes cancer if you lay in it long enough. Why not tax all human production of vitamin D?

Most of the people who will pay this tax are women who go to tanning salons, Humiston said.

And these are not rich women. Rich women “go on vacation,” Humiston said. Or they buy their own tanning beds, which is perhaps why you never read about celebrity tanning salon sightings. Or even tanning bed sightings of Angelo Mozilo, the perpetually tanned and disgraced head of Countrywide mortgage.

“This is a tax on families, husbands and wives, who took a second mortgage on their home and went into the tanning business,” Humiston said.

On top of the economic downturn, it could be just enough to push them into bankruptcy.

“We don’t own these buildings,” Humiston said. “We’re renting from a bunch of commercial real estate guys, who are struggling as it is. We all hear about how commercial real estate is the next shoe to fall. How about 20,000 stores going up” for lease?

More retail centers will fail, more banks will fail, federal tax revenue will decline, and more people will be left unemployed without health-care benefits.

250 people -- all homeless and high-frequency users of jail, detox and emergency departments at taxpayer expense -- have been tracked down by Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and Mental Health Center of Denver outreach workers and given apartments through Denver's social-impact bond program.